Agricultural Extortion and Terrorism
7th April 2011
Single bottles of wine from La Romanée-Conti, the legendary vineyard of Burgundy, sell for upwards of $10,000. In 2010 the owner received a threat, the vineyard would be poisoned unless the owner paid one million euro. When the owner didn’t pay a map was delivered that identified several vines that had already been poisoned by drill and syringe. The French don’t want to talk about this and for good reason, agricultural extortion is very easy and they fear copycats.
It would be easy to do billions of dollars worth of damage to crops and animals with little risk of being caught. As the Chilean case indicates, even a hoax can damage. Fortunately, criminals usually aren’t very smart. The vine poisoner mentioned earlier, for example, was caught trying to collect the money. A little bit of economics would have taught him that you can make lots of money from agricultural extortion without ever having to collect from the victim (and no, I am not saying how although it won’t be a mystery to most readers of this blog). Of course, a terrorist doesn’t even have to collect damages to succeed–just a bit of mad cow or corn rust and we are in trouble (and those aren’t even the biggest threats.)